The 12-bit PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers. The chief engineer who designed the initial version of the PDP-8 was Edson de Castro, who later founded Data General.
The earliest PDP-8 model used diode-transistor logic, packaged on flip chip cards, and was about the size of a small household refrigerator.
This was followed by the PDP-8/S, available in desktop and rack-mount models. By using a one-bit serial ALU implementation, the PDP-8/S was smaller, less expensive, but vastly slower than the original PDP-8. The only mass storage peripheral available for the PDP-8/S was the DF32 disk.
Later systems returned to a faster, fully parallel implementation but used much less-expensive TTL MSI logic. Most surviving PDP-8s are from this era. The PDP-8/E is common, and well-regarded because so many types of I/O devices were available for it. It was often configured as a general-purpose computer.
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The 12-bit PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment...
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The 12-bit PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s. DEC introduced it on 22 March 1965, and sold more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to that date. It was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers. The chief engineer who designed the initial version of the PDP-8 was Edson de Castro, who later founded Data General.
The earliest PDP-8 model used diode-transistor logic, packaged on flip chip cards, and was about the size of a small household refrigerator.
This was followed by the PDP-8/S, available in desktop and rack-mount models. By using a one-bit serial ALU implementation, the PDP-8/S was smaller, less expensive, but vastly slower than the original PDP-8. The only mass storage peripheral available for the PDP-8/S was the DF32 disk.
Later systems returned to a faster, fully parallel implementation but used much less-expensive TTL MSI logic. Most surviving PDP-8s are from this era. The PDP-8/E is common, and well-regarded because so many types of I/O devices were available for it. It was often configured as a general-purpose computer.